Tag Archives: Drama

THEY may be taking to the stage a little later than they hoped, but the cast and crew of the Cloughleigh Amateur Drama Group believe their latest production will be certainly worth waiting for. The local drama group had planned on bringing the acclaimed Jimmy Keary comedy ‘Mother Knows Best’ to the stage of the Cloughleigh Community Centre back in 2021, however Covid meant those plans were put on hold. Now they are back in action and rehearsing hard in preparation for four nights of shows at the hall in Davitt Terrace on Friday, January 27, Saturday, January 28, Friday, February 3 and Saturday, February 4. Willie Crowley of the drama group told The Champion,“We had been hoping to do this play in 2021 but because of Covid we had to put it on hold. “We had actually just done our second play, ‘Nobody’s Talking to Me’ two weeks before everything was shut down, we were very lucky in that. …

SAINT Nicholas will pay a visit to Ennis this weekend as part of an interactive theatre production which aims to bring joy to Ukrainian children in Clare. On Sunday, December 18 the Feast of St Nicholas, the Civic Room of the Buttermarket Building in Drumbiggle will be transformed by Ennis drama club “Ptashka” and Clare Local Development Company for their ‘St Nicholas Workshop’ performance. The event will feature workshops, sweets, gifts and, of course, a meeting with your favourite saint Saint Nicholas. The first performance of the Ptashka drama group is the Saint Nicholas holiday. St Nicholas, Sviatyij Mykolai, comes to Ukraine on December 19 in the Orthodox Julian calendar. The night before, December 18 is often called “Magic Night”.  It is seen as a universal children’s festival, when the saint leaves sweets or games for children.  It is also a Ukrainian tradition for children to perform a play in honour of Saint Nicholas. “We believe that it will be a …

NORTH Clare is to feature prominently in one of the year’s most eagerly awaited home-grown drama series, Smother, which will air on RTÉ One next Sunday night. Shot on location in Lahinch, Liscannor, Spanish Point, Fanore, Ennistymon and Lisdoonvarna, the six-part drama is described as a “domestic noir thriller,” and is a co-production with BBC. It was filmed last year in adherence with pandemic guidelines. The high-end production featured a number of locals as crew members and extras. Writer Kate O’Riordan, who worked on the hit series Mr Selfridge, created the family thriller which sees her tight-knit family of characters gradually unearth deeply buried secrets and live with their unintended consequences. The all-star cast is headed up by Dervla Kirwan who plays matriarch Val – a devoted mother who is determined to protect her family and particularly her three daughters Jenny, Anna, and Grace, at any cost. Jenny (played by Niamh Walsh of Good Omens and Jamestown is a doctor, facing …

POPULAR local drama group Ennis Players are facing a potential crisis in the coming months, as they are set to be left without a premises. Explaining the situation, Arthur Forde, who first became involved with the Players in the late 1970s, said, “We’re sort of homeless at the moment. The property boom has meant that if a place is at all useful in a commercial way, it’s gone. “We’ve been in various places, various halls, various pieces of property around. We had a unit out in the Quin Road industrial estate, but that was always just a temporary stop-gap. As soon as it became needed, we were to be on our bike.” The group have been there for the last two years but are due to vacate the premises this October. Arthur says that, while the group would not be very particular, there are certain things that would be helpful. “It has to be reasonably high anyway. We need the …

Corofin Dramatic Society is one of nine finalists in this year’s All-Ireland Drama Festival taking place in Athlone from April 30. Having picked up numerous awards on the open circuit, the society is returning to the stage in Clare this Saturday night in Glór and in Corofin hall next Wednesday and Thursday with its production of The 39 Steps by Patrick Barlow. “It is certainly a busy couple of weeks,” said director John Clancy. “We performed in Glór in February and then after that we did the circuit. The hall [in Corofin] wasn’t ready for us but it is open now and we performed there this week. We will be in Glór on Saturday and we are back in Corofin again next Wednesday and Thursday, before going to the All-Ireland on the May Bank Holiday weekend,” he explained. John acknowledged that it is time-consuming for the cast and crew but no more so than other hobbies. “I know a few lads …

WHEN Noelle Brown decided to look for her birth parents, she was met with consistent opposition and stone walling, tough experiences she has turned into something positive through her play, Postscript. Born into a mother and baby home in Cork in the 1960s, she was adopted at eight weeks of age. She grew up knowing about the adoption but had very little curiosity around it. “I knew it from a very young age, which was great because I grew up at a time when people weren’t told. I knew people who were told when they were 21, which obviously didn’t go down very well but I suppose those parents thought they were doing the right thing as well. For me, there was no shock element to it.” She grew up quite happily in a loving home and now she says her contentment with her lot may be why she didn’t spend much time thinking about her birth parents. “It [her …

MEMORIES of cultural contests of years gone by will be rekindled at the West County on November 21. Settling Old Scórs is being organised by Kilkishen’s John Torpey. He said he wanted to revisit the heyday of Scór in Clare. “I’m organising a celebratory concert of Scór from the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s and the millennium. Scór was a huge thing, probably one of the greatest social items that the GAA ever came up with,” he said. In the early days of the competition, there was incredible interest in it, not least in his own part of the county. “Christy Curtin from Miltown Malbay came up with a notion that there should be a social aspect to the GAA. Coming out of that, all of the clubs in the county were contacted, including myself and Robert Frost in O’Callaghan’s Mills. A few of us met in Kilkishen on a Saturday night and we said ‘you sing a song, you do this, …

Meetings of Clare’s most famous names is the premise for a one-man show to be staged in the north and east of the county later this year. Lisdoonvarna man Gerry Howard will star in the performance Hats Off To Clare, written and directed by Mountshannon resident, Paul Brennan. The production will explore the imagined interactions of Clare’s most famous factual and fictional characters. Gerry was involved in amateur drama for years before taking the leap into professional acting and it was around the time he decided to leave his career as a hotelier that the seed was sown for this particular production. “I was always involved in amateur acting. I think I started around the age of 12. I was involved in plays with the Lisdoonvarna Dramatic Society and was involved right up to when I sold the hotel, The Carrigann in Lisdoonvarna. When I sold it, it seemed to be a great opportunity to have a cut at something …